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A Harsher Truth

Veganism? A Way for the Environment but Not Morality

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

I read an article recently that asked why killing animals is moral when killing people is evil. It asked why the Holocaust was a blight on our history of human beings when we will march animals into a slaughterhouse and consume their flesh. The writer holds vegan views, and to a degree, vegan views are valid. While 70 percent of pollution is created by just 100 companies, all these companies are fossil fuel creators. Of course if you switch to green energy, that would be better. The second biggest cause of pollution is animals. Their farming, their farting, de-forestation, etc. A vegan diet will help slow this. However, there can be nothing morally gained from choosing not to eat animals. Whilst depending on your original diet, it may have health benefits, there is nothing inherently moral about it.

The vegan argument always rolls over to the same few lines, animals are held in cruel and torturous conditions, and they’re right. Unless you know where your food is coming from, unless it’s free-range, they are pumped with chemicals. They are cramped and depressed. Even free range animals may not be as free range as you think. Factory farmed animals are held in such a tight space that even just seeing pictures of it is enough to make you gag. Their feathers are gone from stress. It’s bad. It’s really bad. The animal rights movement has come in leaps and bounds in the leading years but recently it seems to have come to a halt. Where are those people that should be campaigning? I’m worrying, they’re vegan.

Male chicks really are ground up from birth. They should be grown and slaughtered for meat, but there’s not enough time. People won’t stay rich like that. That is what it is down to, the rich. Or more specifically, the greedy. There must be more animals rights. Something to look money bled poison puss balls of people in the eye and say, hey, you better stop that.

How could an absence of existence possibly be a cure to cruelty? Most vegans will agree that not everyone will go vegan, that there are some with too many health problems and allergies to lead a healthy vegan life, that some people in the far future will still eat meat. So do vegans try to make sure those animals have better farming conditions? That they aren’t forced to live in cruel conditions? No. They campaign for animals to never be slaughtered, not for them to have a life worth living. Any path that leads to death is cruelty to them, but they seem to be forgetting, on Earth, all paths lead to death. It is a fear that we will all die, and it is something that can be hard to come to terms with. No matter where you go and what you do, death will be there beside you. Morbidly, it is something I find comfortable. But it's not the same for everyone. To many, death is something to fear. They ignore things like the fact, that every cow rescued from the slaughterhouse is one more cow who will one day sit down, with aches in their limbs, and die. That death is not one they may necessarily want, but it is one that will have to be, and one that many can even be grateful for.

One thing vegans do have an obsession with is the slaughter process. How animals are first stunned, but animal right movements campaigned for the stunning. They ignore why they’re stunned. They want you on their movement so they describe it horrifically as possible without any explanation. They’re stunned so they’re knocked out of it, so they don’t really know what's going on. Then their throats are slit! It’s not that horrendous. They’ve been stunned and can’t feel the cut the knife makes. Bleeding to death is one of the best ways to die. I’ve read that, except for the pain of the cut, losing blood does not hurt. It just feels like you’re falling asleep. It’s actually a pretty nice way to go. Animals, being animals, do not understand the appearance of blood, while humans can see it and can put together the death of someone. They see it and tell only that another animal was once here, and they can usually tell that by the smell of creatures, not the sight of red. Their own blood does not scare them. Since they don’t understand death, it's possible they really do think they’re sleeping.

For English speaking vegans, you might even hear them claim that we use the word beef so that we do not associate it with the animal. This isn’t true. English speakers copied french chef who say the word "boeuf." In Spanish you say "carne de vaca," literally meaning the meat of the cow, or cow flesh. Unfortunately, it highlights the naivety of vegans. After all, if they really think that whilst the English were burning those following a false religion, sometimes literally lighting folks up like candles, that while peasants were fined pennies for killing a neighbour, how could they possibly think we would have been upset by the death of a cow?

One thing that gets on my nerves about vegans is a spreading of false information. Recently, I had a conversation with a human who claimed, despite most vegan websites mentioning that you must have B12 supplements, you can live a perfectly healthy vegan diet without them. Which was an amazing fact when they said in the same sentence that they live off junk food. Vegan junk food is fortified with B12 supplements. I assume they do this so their customers do not eventually die from malnutrition. I explained this, but she still didn’t understand. For those of us who would choose a vegan diet, but who would also make their dinners from scratch, many almost completely avoiding junk food, they would become ridden with malnutrition unless they took a few healthy supplements and had managed to successfully create a healthy, balanced diet for themselves.

One Youtuber who I have a mild respect for is "Unnatural Vegan" who at a young age falsely believed she could live of a fruit diet. She has since learned how to live on a healthy vegan diet and gives the truth about it. That in the wild, no human was built to be vegan, but that does not mean you cannot be one. Most folks admit this, but not all of them, and if one of the vitamin deniers ever has a child and goes through the "no more junk food, you’re going to be healthy phase," unfortunately there's a good chance that child could become severely damaged. So that the vegan movement doesn’t look bad, many vegans ignore this minority, and this will and could already be resulting in abused children. Unfortunately even if these children began to consume meat, the type of damage they will have will already unrepairable. They can only prevent it from getting worse, and this is why it is important to talk about. It’s why unless you’re willing to work hard every single day to make sure your child is getting enough calories and every single vitamin they need, I would personally advise against having vegan children. Not to say they cannot exist, but the majority of people aren’t particularly bright and I do not think the risk is worth it.

I hate when people say we are not designed to eat meat, because we are. We cannot in the slightest survive without meat. B12 is not something found lying around, and eating sh*t covered carrots is not going to help you. In fact I’m pretty sure that's how you get worms. The dumbest of the lot will point out that our human teeth are not as spiky as that as a wolf, but we evolved in completely different ways and, basically, that's not how science works. We are predators. We are stamina predators. We don’t have claws because we have a buttocks (no really). Our butt is what helps us to walk, and chase an animal to death. We don’t have quite as many claws and fangs of other creatures because we began as scavengers, and then did something no other species did, set traps to catch our pray. It is almost impossible to compare humans to other species. It's part of why we’re so adaptable, why we’ve taken over the globe. Why we’re alone on this planet. I’m sorry.

Then there's the morality of it, the first paragraph of every argument, the sentence, "you would not kill a child, yet you would kill and consume an animal." Why? Here are a few reasons; all of them are true but, in my next paragraph, I will talk about one:

I would consume the flesh of humans if it were not for the fact it drives us mad.

Someone would be pretty pissed if I killed their human they spent nine months making and screaming to push out of their hoohahs.

Animals eat animals. Are all carnivores evil, or does that not even matter?

Hamsters often eat their own babies.

Morality is not inherent. Part of the reasons we don’t consume humans is because we ourselves do not want to be consumed.

Actually I probably wouldn’t eat a human unless I was literally starving to death, but for some people, I’m sure that's the reason. No, the real reason is number five, that animals do not abide by our rules of society. Do you know why? Our morals, our basic rules that we have grown and sowed into our offspring. They are good rules that have helped our species live close to one another happily without worry. These are the rules that have made our species successful. Today, we are smarter than we’ve ever been and we hold sympathy in our hearts. We understand each of us have thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams. That we are equal and we treat them as we wish to be treated. Part of why the Holocaust is horrific, is because that was recent, and those were humans who knew those people had feelings. The fact that a whole country could turn on a single group of people, like they were just sneaky birds that lived on the other side of the lake, is horrific. That regular people had been turned back into the monsters they once were, nearly wiping out an entire race of adults and children with no mercy. Millions died, more people than I will ever know. Conditions more horrific than any horror movie has yet to show. It could happen again. Chosen at random, any government on our plant could say, “Round up the Mexicans, they are the same innocent people as the rest of our society, but for no good reason I will see them slaughtered.” We must nip this behaviour in the bud. We must not stand for hatred of our fellow humans due to sexuality or where on the planet they were born, and the shade of their skin. None of these are moral traits. Maybe someone will choose your trait next.

So what is the difference between us feeling sympathy for a human and us feeling it for an animal? But maybe that is just it. They are not us. Dogs will eat humans, pigs will eat humans, and despite the word herbivore, many animals are not true herbivores. Deer and horses who get the sneaky opportunity will grind up baby birds in their mouth. While we can argue that maybe our pets, our cats and dogs, are “tuned” to our emotions, those are companion animals that have evolved beside us to work in groups. It would be an achievement in the evolvement if they were able to read fear in our faces as easily as we read it from their poofed up tails. They’d evolve to know to run in fear, when we do.

Why kill a cow and not a human? Well, because it is a cow. I have never been under the impression that they didn’t have emotion. Animals don’t have a concept of death. They can’t talk to each other and discuss it. They communicate, but they don’t talk about morals, about the meaning of life, and why they exist. They are blessed purely with being. I’m envious to a degree, and perhaps that's why cats spend their lives lying around. They’re doing what they love, forever. Stress, depression, happiness, quirks, these are emotions more or less everything can feel. It’s why we relate to them.

Humans overthink things, and that's a fact. We think of the future, of the world ending, of stars and space, of things we never knew and what it is like to live the life of someone else. Through stories we can imagine we are other people. We can create different places that don’t even exist. We can invent thoughts and religions and gods. Despite the fact that none of this matters. Despite the fact our brains and imaginations are all part of an evolution that helped us to hunt, helped us to farm, and helped us to look after one another when we are in need. That in the barren landscape, where other creatures have emotion but no forethought, that in the end, the difference between us doesn’t matter. We are guided on the same path of certainty. We are alive, and soon we will be dead. And that's okay. It’s fine. You’re able to experience, and to have fun, and if it worries you too much, then who knows? Maybe we really did invent god. Maybe there is an afterlife. If it worries you.

Why kill a cow? Why kill a pig? Why kill a chicken and not a human? Because they are not human, and their flesh offers health benefits. Their flesh is one that makes our diet safe, so that we cannot go too wrong and permanently damage ourselves. The animal in our place would kill us without a second thought because they don’t have any second thoughts to give. Why kill a cow? Because it’s a cow.